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Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based sources even as they borrow methods from these fields.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- PART I Intellectual Histories of the Information Age -- Imperial Attractions: Benjamin Franklin's New Experiments of 1751 -- From Heat Engines to Digital Printouts: Machine Models of the Body from the Victorian Era to the Human Genome Project -- The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics -- PART II Visual Culture, Subjectivity, and the Education of the Senses -- More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale's Tours, imax, and Motion Simulation Rides -- Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States -- The Convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood: The Next Generation of Military Training Simulations -- PART III Materiality, Time, and the Reproduction of Sound and Motion -- Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History -- Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls -- Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics -- PART IV Digital Aesthetics, Social Texts, and Art Objects -- Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media -- Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions -- Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index

While the term 'culture' has come to be very widely used in both popular and academic discourse, it has a variety of meanings, and the differences among these have not been given sufficient attention. This book explores these meanings, and identifies some of the problems associated with them, as well as examining the role that values should play in cultural analysis. The development of four, very different, conceptions of culture is traced from the nineteenth century onwards: a notion of aesthetic cultivation associated with Matthew Arnold; the evolutionary view of culture characteristic of nineteenth-century anthropology; the idea of diverse cultures characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century anthropology; and a conception of culture as a process of situated meaning-making – found today across anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. These conceptions of culture are interrogated, and a reformulation of the concept is sketched. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and education